asianamlitfans | A Review of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024) (Reply)

Written by Stephen Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you know, we occasionally set our sights to other allied communities and writers of varying BIPOC backgrounds. One of our favorite writers is none other than the prolific Louise Erdrich, who graces us with another brilliant novel: The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)! This robust marketing description gives us quite a bit of information: “In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day. The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.”

As is common for Erdrich, there are always a ton of characters, but Erdrich is an obvious pro and knows exactly how to cultivate the depth of these figures, even down to the most minor of these individuals in terms of their import to the plots. I will admit: the first 1/3 of the novel or so I found taxing: the central love triangle between Kismet, Gary, and Hugo just sort of drove me crazy, but I suppose I don’t give enough room for the messiness that is young love. In any case, I eventually settled into these dynamics, especially because we discover the reason behind much of these complicated and dysfunctional connections. The other main elements involve the older residents of the town, the thirty, forty and fiftysomethings or so that are the older generation above Kismet, Gary, and Hugo. There’s a book club that links most of the major female characters. Hugo’s mom, Bev owns a bookstore Bev’s Bookery, that brings these women together. Kismet’s mom Crystal is in a strained marital relationship with a man named Martin. Then there’s the fact that there’s been a major tragedy that befell the town some months back that has impacted all of the youth there. This latter issue is the one that was the most surprising to me, as it emerges in the back end of the text. The community generally talks around what has happened but when we finally get to see what it is that is keeping some of the characters so guarded, the novel really gains momentum as some actual healing and reconnection can begin. What I loved best about this book though is something that I haven’t seen in Erdrich before: I feel as though Erdrich always pushes herself stylistically and, in this novel, she uses more clipped sentences than I’ve seen in the past. It is also paired with a sly humorous undertone that I think is more prominent than other novels that I’ve read. There’s also the way that Erdrich will just come up and surprise you with a narrative sleight of hand. There’s always a little bit of magic and mischief in Erdrich’s fictional world: a ghost will pop up in this novel’s case and then there’s the fact that a short chapter is taken from the perspective of a river and how it handles the various beings that fall in it. If there is a minor quibble it’s that twenty years pass by in the blink of a couple pages at the conclusion, which suggests that there might have been hundreds of pages of material for a different novel. After all, Erdrich is the one who has been compared to Faulkner for quite some time, and we can see how maybe there might have been more threads to pull together for another story. Whatever the case, Erdrich is clearly at her heights of creative genius, and we are all the more fortunate for how productive she has been as a writer and as an artist.

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